Translated material
And the singing vampires will continue to sing. Vasily Stepanov says goodbye to 2025 and tells what to watch during the holidays
“If 2025 were an animal, it would need to be kept in a zoo,” says film critic and regular Republic contributor Vasily Stepanov. In response to the editor’s request to recommend films and TV series for the long weekend, he sent a long text about what the past year was like for the industry. About the deal between Warner and Netflix, “Minecraft in cinema” and the new Jarmusch, Alexander Sokurov and “Outsource”. However, there are also specific recommendations with descriptions of the best films of the year. And for the most impatient - the section “serials in one line”.
2025: Imitation of Life
It was a good year for cinema. No joke, interesting. There is no reason for great whining. Richard Linklater has two films, Radu Jude has two, Steven Soderbergh has two, the Safdie brothers have split into two, and even Netflix has released a couple of good films. That being said, if 2025 were an animal, he would definitely be worth keeping in a zoo. After all, he turned out to be quite wild. And it ends quite wildly. Not with lists of films, achievements, prizes, but with discussions of the Warner Bros. deal.
It’s funny, but the sale is taking place against the backdrop of the studio’s “success” at the box office. If you open the tables of annual grosses, you will see that there are as many as seven Warner films in the top twenty in America, here the company has surpassed Disney, Paramount, and Universal. At the top, so far unattainable for the third series of “Avatar” (James Cameron has January ahead of him), “Minecraft in Cinema” is, on the one hand, a typical franchise cringe in the “how can we make a little more money on someone else’s intellectual property” format, and on the other, whatever one may say, a kind of author’s blockbuster by independent comedian Jared Hess; the man who invented Napoleon Dynamite can also stack cubes if you ask politely.
Still from the movie “Minecraft at the Movies” (2025, dir. Jared Hess)
Now Warner’s victory may seem Pyrrhic, but the studio has been working towards it for so long that showing at least creative well-being against the backdrop of financial problems seems right. Maintaining a good face is difficult, but important. The very need for cash injections became clear already in the middle of the year, and at the end of the year the question was formulated in the following terms: who exactly and what exactly will buy. Where will the investor and big brother come from: platform behemoth Netflix or the Skydance/Paramount conglomerate? The saddest thing is that buyers and observers, with all the listed successes of the creative and marketing departments, seem to be most interested not in the library of classic films (Kubrick, Malick, Polak, Craven and dozens of other great artists worked with the Hollywood major; they have “Casablanca,” damn it!) and not in the copyrights to large franchises - “The Matrix”, “Mad Max”, “Running Man”, not in contracts for DC comics, but in assets in the form HBO (of course, it’s hard to pass by The Sopranos, The Wire or Descendants) or television networks. Even President Trump was alarmed, demanding to deal with CNN (also a Warner asset).
Warner and Netflix logos
Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg / NurPhoto / NurPhoto via AFP
For those who are very sad about the fate of Warner, for the sake of order it is perhaps worth recalling that this is not the first deal of this kind for the company in the 21st century - in 2001 there was a merger with AOL (the giant Internet provider dissolved into Time Warner), and in 2018 with AT&T. That is, “we will survive this trouble,” probably. Casablanca will not suddenly disappear into history. Joker James Gunn will continue to reboot Batman films (although it would be better if he slowed down). Maybe even Christopher Nolan will return - I’m sure that Netflix will have a couple of Imaxes and a hundred kilometers of film for him.
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